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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25413205">Dimensions &amp; Demons</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meilan_Firaga/pseuds/Meilan_Firaga'>Meilan_Firaga</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Constantine (TV), Doctor Strange (2016)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Crossover, Gen, Horror, Survival, Survival Horror, Woke up in another universe</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 04:13:21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,993</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25413205</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meilan_Firaga/pseuds/Meilan_Firaga</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Something</i> invaded London, and in the midst of trying to deal with it John Constantine found himself picked up by a being unlike any he'd ever seen and unceremoniously dropped in the middle of a fight with magic unlike anything he's ever seen.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Multifandom Horror Exchange (2020)</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Dimensions &amp; Demons</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/alchemise/gifts">alchemise</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Moving outside the bounds of time was always a bit like waking up on an improbably calm morning in a remote location. For the first few conscious breaths, you’re certain that you’ve died. It’s so still, so eerie and quiet, that you can’t help but jump to the conclusion that something has gone horribly wrong. It has gone wrong, of course. Humans aren’t meant to see the world in a state of pause, and bearing witness to it puts an irreversible mark on one’s psyche. By this point John was so used to it that he barely blinked. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It was not entirely unusual for him to wake up in an unfamiliar place. Or a familiar place for that matter. Waking up on a street he was pretty sure was in Hong Kong while the city was frozen in time was new. The last thing he could remember before waking up face down in the gutter was an exorcism gone horrifically wrong. The demon— he never had managed to get it to reveal its name— had been tearing London to shreds. It had strange minions that each sported a single glowing purple eye in the middle of each of their otherwise featureless faces. Not the blood, bugs, and decay he was used to, which in retrospect had probably been a red flag. He’d not seen much of the demon itself, either. It was largely impressions, deep laughter, and a symbol in a script he didn’t recognize from any of his long years of study.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He had, of course, promptly stuck his nose in the fucker’s destructive business. Wouldn’t do to have something dark and nasty ripping good old London to bits when he was right there. The minion hit like a freight train. He discovered this when he lit one on fire with a combination of dabbling and syphoning the petrol from a parked car. He learned to avoid their haymaker swings and instead started trying every trick he knew to banish them back to hell. It had been largely unsuccessful, but he did manage to sort maybe half a dozen.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Then it all went tits up.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The world had never completely fallen away quite like that before. One minute he was chanting around the cigarette hanging at the corner of his mouth and the next he was floating in a sea of the psychedelic that was wilder than any trip he’d ever been on—a feat that was beyond impressive given his history of experimentation. Amongst the glowing balls of color in the blacklight hellscape that surrounded him a pair of enormous violet eyes appeared in a face made of shifting darkness. They were unlike anything he’d ever seen. The thing’s voice rumbled through him, shaking every fiber of his being. He might have pissed himself just a bit. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>John couldn’t quite remember exactly what the being had said. He was sure, at least, that it was something about getting him out of the way. Maybe something about proving the futility of struggling against its power. All he knew was that it spoke, everything went black, and then he woke up on the ground with the scent of garlic and that terrible stillness all around him. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He had a pack of smokes halfway out of his pocket by the time he managed to struggle to his feet. He got one into his mouth, started to look around while he brought up his lighter, and stopped short when he got a good look around. Hong Kong wasn’t just frozen. It was frozen in the middle of the same kind of disaster he’d just seen in London. Only, the sky hadn’t been ripped open with that psychedelic realm where the demon had taken him leaking through to consume the city. Buildings were in states of collapse. People were frozen in the midst of fleeing in terror.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And then, in the space between one breath and the next, time was no longer stopped.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It was moving </span>
  <em>
    <span>backwards</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>John stood in shock for a minute before he had to quickly dodge out of the way of a cart of street food that had been knocked over and was busy setting itself to rights. He glanced up at the sky, watching as the purple shimmer began to retreat, skyscrapers repairing themselves in its wake. Without his prompting his feet began to move, carrying him toward the epicenter of whatever strange magic was occurring. He skidded around a corner, sliding beneath the arc of a cloud of bricks as they returned to their proper places in a building, and found himself sliding straight into a battle between a group of magicians that were wielding powers the likes of which he’d never seen.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Magic didn’t work like this. It wasn’t flash and pizzaz, the shimmering shields and weaponry he watched the half dozen people conjuring on the streat. At least, it didn’t work that way in his reality. His stomach sank to somewhere in the vicinity of his knees. He reached out with his senses, searching for that faint tingling feeling that served as a barely perceptible means of recognizing the occult. Nothing. The familiar patterns of psychic energy didn’t run through whatever version of Hong Kong he’d been dropped into. There was something there, but he didn’t know how to navigate.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Wherever he was, it wasn’t home, and the magic wasn’t what he’d spent the better part of his life studying. In the pit of John’s soul, he felt an aching tremble of fear. He forced the knot in his throat down and squared his shoulders. He’d walked into hell and back. New and frightening this world may be, but if he could face down the fires of hell he’d square up and manage whatever this world might bring.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The fighting at the end of the street was escalating. The world had nearly been put completely to rights, the cloud of the being’s strange universe condensed down to just a few blocks of space. And then, quite suddenly, one of the strange figures slammed a fist into the ground and everything came to another sudden halt. John ducked quickly down behind a parked car, peeking around the front bumper to keep an eye on the fight. Or, well, the conversation. While half of them struggled to their feet and shifted into fighting stances the others seemed focused on the sky above. There were words being exchanged that were too faint for him to hear, but John didn’t need to hear what was being said when one of them rose into the sky and flew toward that otherworldly landscape.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He needed to </span>
  <em>
    <span>see</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Scrying had never been his specialty. He wasn’t much for watching when the option of action was on the table, but the world was on pause and something beyond the scope of his imagination was hovering in a rift above the city. If he was going to survive here, he needed to start to gain an understanding of what he was up against. He needed to see what was going on in that psychedelic plane he’d visited so briefly before he found himself on a Hong Kong street. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>With one swift jerk he ripped the side mirror off the car he was crouching behind and shifted to sit with his back to the tire. The penknife in his pocket made a quick, deep incision on the thumb of his left hand. There was a deep, unfamiliar hum lurking just beyond the reach of his senses. It wasn’t like the dark forces he harnessed at home. The flavor of rot and sulfur that emanated from every pulse of the magic he was used to handling was replaced instead by thrumming pulses that made him think of the anticipation in a sunrise. He reached for that hum of energy while he traced his blood around the border of the mirror and began to chant. It didn’t react to the spell in anything close to the same way. Normally, when scrying with a mirror he would use the looking glass as a sort of window into wherever he was looking. This time he felt that pulse of wild energy sweeping over him, and in the space between one breath and the next he found himself surrounded by that psychedelic universe once more. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He looked from side to side, glancing all around. He could still feel the weight of the tire against his back, but if it weren’t for that sensation he could assume that he had followed the strange man in the cape up into the sky. Even so, he could see that cape as the wild landscape zipped around him, the spell apparently latching onto the other man as a focus. And he watched. He watched while the man with the goatee waved a bracelet of green light onto his wrist. He watched while he approached that horrible, glowing face. He watched while the man made the insistence that he was there to strike a bargain, and he watched while the face—Dormammu, he heard it called—brutally slaughtered him.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And then he watched it again. Over and over and over again.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>John lost count. He’d seen all manner of brutal, agonizing deaths over the years. Seeing them all play out on the same person in rapid succession was a new kind of hell. It felt like he watched for ages. Death after death after death. The man only insisted continuously that the loop of his own terrible murder was just how things were going to be. That Bill Murray movie with cosmic murder instead of small town Pennsylvania hijinks. Thousands of different versions with the same outcome, and both parties seemed to be aware of just how many they’d been through.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You will never win,” Dormammu insisted after what felt like the millionth death.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No,” the man admitted, beginning push back up to his feet. “But I can lose. Again. And again. And again. And again forever. That makes you my prisoner.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It wasn’t long after that before the monstrosity gave in. The magician laid out his terms, and John found that he would be hard pressed to find a loophole. He muttered the counter to end his spell, finding himself thrust back onto that frozen street just in time to see the caped man return. In the moments that followed he watched three living humans be transformed into the same featureless creatures that had attacked his home while they were being sucked up into the crazy dimension that was rapidly disappearing from view.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>One thing was certain: whatever power Dormammu had hoped to show him had backfired spectacularly. He’d meant to make John afraid, to isolate him in this strange place where Dormammu had clearly assumed that he would be victorious, but all he’d done was display that he could be beaten by the most irritating of means. If nothing else, John could certainly get behind that kind of fight plan.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“That was inspiring,” he complimented as he approached the three men that remained, startling them before they’d managed to set the world to spinning again. “I thought I was alone in annoying the dark forces of the universe to keep them distracted from their favored prey.” He watched the emotions play over their faces and got the sneaking suspicion that his ability to still move when they’d put the rest of the world on pause was something unique. “Do I have something on my face, chaps? You’re staring.” He pulled another cigarette from his pocket, lit it and took a deep breath. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Who are you?” asked the man he’d just watched make such an impressive display. “How are you moving outside of time?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Fuck me, where are my manners? My name’s John Constantine.” He let the smoke billow from his mouth as he regarded them, already certain that they were going to be his only ticket home. “And I seem to have lost my own reality.”</span>
</p>
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